When pressed during her confirmation process on school desegregation policies, her coy answer—“I do not support programs that would lead to increased segregation”—was laced again with that market-friendly code word: “Empirical evidence finds school choice programs lead to more integrated schools than their public school counterparts.”2

The concept of “school choice,” which emphasizes individual family preferences in how students and funding are distributed, squares neatly with the neoliberal reform agenda of pushing public education into the realm of private business. Who could oppose self-determination for parents, after all? But in a “free market” built on an unjust system, not all choices are created equal.3

Yet that seems to be DeVos’s vision of “diversity.” Her abrupt decision to cancel an Obama administration program designed to help communities desegregate schools, known as Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunity, has outraged education advocates, who fear Trump will aggravate social barriers in K–12 education. The program was relatively small-scale—just $12 million in seed grants issued to school districts across the country seeking to develop “locally driven strategies to increase socioeconomic diversity in schools.” The grants would barely dent the system-wide civil-rights crisis of school segregation, but DeVos claimed even this fledgling program was unworthy of taxpayer dollars because it was focused on planning and not “implementation,” TheWashington Post reports.4

Advocates say the cuts mark a setback for creative school-diversity programs that are trying to uphold the constitutional precepts established in Brown v. Board of Education, the precedent that commits the government to correcting institutionalized racial barriers in education by proactively desegregating schools.5

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DeVos argues the private sector should be trusted to help schools redistribute opportunity, by expanding corporate charter schools and giving families vouchers to finance private schooling, as a supposedly higher-quality alternative to neighborhood schools. But often, these programs end up slowing or reversing desegregation for the families who most need it.6

Given the option to transfer to more affluent schools, parents typically make the “rational choice” to perpetuate “white flight” from poorer, blacker urban centers. The flip side of choice is the de facto exclusion of children of color, who get left behind with underfunded, understaffed “inner city” schools.7

Two-thirds of school transfers in one program and 90 percent of transfers in the other program increased segregation in private schools, public schools, or both sectors…. There is a strong risk that voucher programs will be used by white families to leave more diverse public schools for predominantly white private schools and by religious families to move to parochial private schools, increasing the separation of students by race/ethnicity and religious background.9

As with Jim Crow, classrooms don’t integrate when individuals make nice choices—but when lawmakers act for the collective good.10

In New Orleans, a charter-school industry boom that followed Hurricane Katrina has resulted in decreased instructional spending, while raising administrative costs by two-thirds. Opening Doors seed money could have helped policymakers equalize opportunity across schools, but as one of the country’s leading advocates for charter schools, DeVos seems more interested in expanding the New Orleans model nationwide rather than addressing the deep racial segregation that has persisted since the Jim Crow era.13

Many school choice options, including vouchers, were established in part to offer alternatives to the local school and counter this link between neighborhoods and schools. However, some people are better able to exercise “choice” than others—taking advantage of school choice options depends on knowing and understanding the options, having an option located close by or having transportation available, and having enough seats available.16

But even if DeVos masks attacks on public education as a kind of “free choice,” Century Foundation researcher Holly Potter points out that many communities have chosen to commit to school diversity as a public-policy priority. Giving kids more equal educational opportunities helps decrease residential segregation and create more inclusive neighborhoods in the long run. Since schools are so linked to surrounding social gaps, progressive communities should recognize that “Housing policy is school policy, but school policy can also be housing policy.”17

Some districts have used “controlled choice” desegregation plans, for example, which can provide voluntary ranked-choice systems, in which school assignments are structured to prioritize the needs of disadvantaged students without aggravating existing socioeconomic gaps. According to Potter, “If DeVos is actually interested in school choice, then expanding public school choice options like these would be a fantastic way to meet the goals of integration and choice at the same time. Unfortunately, DeVos seems to have a very narrow definition of choice focused on school vouchers.”18

The Trump administration may be regressing to the days of “separate but equal” through deregulation and privatization, but in the face of a neoliberal assault and eroding federal support for educational justice, the one choice local communities all have now is to resist Trump’s agenda, and instead work collectively to renew the lessons of Brown v. Boardof Education for a new generation.19

It's amazing to me how liberals get away with the "soft bigotry of low expectations" such as this - "However, some people are better able to exercise “choice” than others—taking advantage of school choice options depends on knowing and understanding the options". Do they not think that poor black parents understand the need for education and will learn what is needed to find a good school for their child if given the opportunity ? Almost nowhere in the article did it even mention the quality of the school. Like many liberal ideas, it's all about race.

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Walter Pewensays:

April 21, 2017 at 8:06 pm

You are way out of your league. This is just stupid.

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Timothy Trewynsays:

April 20, 2017 at 10:33 am

Court decisions of the last 50 years have increasingly alienated religious parents from placing their children in public schools. And some parents have hopes of shielding their children from the anti-social personality disorder found in the general public school population (sometimes only to find it is pervasive wherever they go) by placing their child in a smaller, more selective school. Profiteers have seized the opportunity thus created. Yet our laws compel the education of children. Somehow the compulsory nature of the military environment justifies the chaplaincy and its salaries and spiritual spaces rendered and constructed at public expense, but the compulsory nature of the education of children somehow calls for an extraordinary level of censorship (some without legal basis) in the public schools. This irritation dwells in DeVos' base, but do not count me in that. The cure involves the kind of acknowledgement the military has made: religion abounds in the environment, and a public mission does better to accommodate it in a manner that allows freedom of conscience for all, but without censorship. Children, too, are intrigued at some level by the problem of being. How strange, and lacking in comprehensive consideration, to exclude learning to deal with humanity's diversity in approaches to the problem from the curriculum.

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Timothy Trewynsays:

April 20, 2017 at 9:43 am

How did "some people" become "poor black parents"?

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Walter Pewensays:

April 19, 2017 at 4:27 pm

If anything, I hope DeVos sounds as a wake up call to America. This ongoing slide toward charters, with the huge amounts of money the private sector has already begun grabbing, needs to be slowed (that's all were going to get). Cut it off when possible. There is NO reason on earth inner city schools cannot start getting adequate funding for all kids in our lifetimes. All the money we are spending on corrections and after the fact events that need to go into kids NOW. I don't give a damn where it comes from. It's there, and this country could say have half of the kids who are now messing up doing well instead. The Koch Brothers might not like it, but they will be dead soon, God willing. Then the inner cities can REALLY pull themselves up by their bootstraps. That's the last thing Koch whitey wants but the thing that needs to happen. In fact, get the money from them. They sure have it....

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Alan Backmansays:

April 20, 2017 at 6:38 am

This idea that the inner city schools fail due to inadequate funding is just liberal propaganda. Due to a series of court cases (called the Abbot Cases), NJ was forced to send millions to poor districts like Newark. These Abbot Districts now spend more than any other district in the country - yet barely half of students even graduate. Money without much needed educational reform (especially including charts) is simply throwing good money after bad.

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Walter Pewensays:

April 21, 2017 at 8:04 pm

You present a very incomplete answer. You don't know that you are talking about. It's quite complex, and stating it the way you do here is poor form to say the least.